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The channel · coming soon

Every build filmed. Failures included.

A workshop channel from a cottage on Rue Lavaud. 3D printing, electronics, recycling and repair, built for this place and published free. One longer video every two weeks, English audio with English and French subtitles, and short clips in between.

Tell me when it launches YouTube — coming soon

Status The channel isn't live yet: the first episodes are scripted and being filmed as the workshop is built.

Every episode opens the same way

Bonjour, kia ora, welcome to Le Petit Atelier.

And ends the same way: the impact counter, then les plans sont gratuits — the plans are free.

In between: hands, timber, honest numbers, and at least one thing that didn't work.

Episodes 1–4 · working titles

How it starts.

  1. Building Le Petit Atelier

    I’m building a robotics workshop in an 1868 cottage that was once a church

    The room as found, the heritage rule — not a single screw in the walls — and the promise: free plans for everything.

  2. Building Le Petit Atelier

    Furnishing a workshop without buying anything new

    A salvage run and a free-standing bench, built with two mistakes left in. Plans released free.

  3. Building Le Petit Atelier

    The quiet workshop: sound, dust and neighbours

    Other businesses share this building. Measuring noise and air before and after, with a sensor built on camera.

  4. Second Life

    A bottle becomes a spool: the cheapest recycling machine

    A drink bottle cut into a ribbon and pulled through a hot nozzle. The first spool, and the honest test numbers.

Working titles. The order may change — the bottle episode might move up.

Year one

Four series in the first year.

  • Building Le Petit Atelier

    The fit-out of a cottage you can’t drill, ending in the workshop tour.

  • Second Life

    Waste into filament into useful parts, with the honest test numbers.

  • Repair Day

    The monthly repair café: a quick win, a hard case, and one that couldn’t be saved.

  • Trap Tech

    Sensors for trappers, from the first conversation to a winter in the field.

Series · Trap Tech · 6 episodes

From a conversation on the trap line to ten traps through a winter.

Designed with the volunteers who'll carry it up a hill, not for them. Episode one is a conversation, not a build.

  1. What do you still do by hand?

    A conversation with trappers on the line. Not a build. The brief, written by them.

  2. The cheapest thing that could work

    A breadboard sensor, and a printed mechanical flag with no electronics at all.

  3. A box that survives a Banks Peninsula winter

    Enclosures, gaskets, UV and recycled plastic, tested.

  4. Power, when there is no sun

    Batteries, solar sizing and sleep current, measured honestly.

  5. Getting the data somewhere useful

    Radio range tests in real gullies, and a map a volunteer can read on a phone.

  6. Ten traps, one winter

    The field report: what broke, what worked, and the dataset.

The rules for this series

  • Never present an untested device as finished.
  • Publish the false-alarm rate.
  • Credit volunteers by name, with their permission.
  • If they say the idea is wrong, film that and build what they need.
The trap sensor project Trappers, talk to us

When it's live

Be there for episode one.

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